Subj: Scotland: Making poverty a crime



Date: 28 Sep, 1998



Source: The Scotsman







Making poverty a crime

You don't have to be a danger to society to be sent to 

prison, says Ian Bruce. Failing to make ends meet can put 

you there as well





JANET committed a crime apparently so serious and 

threatening to society that the court had little option but 

to send her to Cornton Vale, Scotland's notorious and 

suicide-plagued women's prison. The cause? A bald tyre. The 

sentence? Seven days. The 33-year-old Glaswegian, a first-

time offender owed the State UKP46, a debt that was to cost 

her a week of her life, her livelihood and her self-respect.



In 1995, Janet had been working as a private-hire taxi 

driver when she was involved in a minor collision with 

another vehicle. Although cleared of any blame for the 

accident, routine police checks revealed that one of her 

tyres was worn, for which she was handed a UKP40 fine and 

three penalty points on her licence.



She should have paid the financial penalty, but she didn't. 

As the legal process rolled on, she was given the 

opportunity to pay the fine off in instalments of UKP5. She 

defaulted on those payments as well.



Janet admits she was stupid, but is still devastated by the 

way the full force of the law was unleashed upon her. One 

day the police arrived at her house to serve a warrant for 

her arrest for non-payment.



Despite the minor nature of her offence (and, ironically the 

fact that at the moment of her apprehension she had more 

than enough to cover the outstanding sum in her pocket), 

Janet spent the weekend that followed in police custody. 

Whenever she left her cell, she did so under escort, 

shackled with a pair of heavy, chafing handcuffs. After 

sentencing, the by-now terrified woman was driven to Cornton 

Vale in a bus full of other freshly sentenced women, many of 

them beginning longer-term periods of incarceration for 

serious offences.



The usual admissions procedure followed. A process in which 

the bewildered woman was roughly stripped, searched and 

showered before being thrown in with the rest of the prison 

population. She claims that at this point, she was 

immediately surrounded by hardened inmates looking for 

drugs, money or anything else of value they could get. As 

the realisation broke that she was alone in an alien 

environment with nobody she could turn to, Janet cried 

herself to sleep.



Joanne O'Reilly and Yvonne Gilmour, women who were to become 

famous as the third and sixth inmates of the women's prison 

to commit suicide in the last two years, were in the jail at 

the time. "I knew them and I had an idea of what they were 

going through," says Janet. "There were girls in there who 

had only been around for a matter of weeks before they had 

been bullied into becoming somebody's gay lover. It was more 

or less rape. I can only thank God that the experience 

didn't affect me like it did them because it so easily could 

have. The very thought of it makes my blood run cold. It's 

something I don't think I could ever forget."



When you meet Janet, a shy, respectable little woman with 

about as much hardness and guile in her as Squirrel Nutkin, 

it is scarcely believable that a court could have condemned 

her to a prison sentence over a sum less than the price of a 

week's groceries. However, hers is not an unusual case. 

According to the latest Scottish Office figures, each year 

around 9,000 Scots are sent to prison for non-payment of 

fines. On average, they will serve an 11-day sentence 

because they owe the system UKP256. Almost 500 will begin 

their jail terms owing less than UKP50, over half are young 

people aged less than 30 and, unbelievably, 52 per cent of 

the entire female prison population are there because they 

failed to pay minor court fines.



While accepting that there must always be a reasonable 

punishment available to reprimand those who break the law. 

many members of the legal establishment argue that hundreds 

of Scots will go to prison this year because they are simply 

too poor to pay the fines levied upon them. Gerry Brown, 

former chairman of the Scottish Law Society's Criminal Law 

Committee, is deeply concerned by a trend which seems to be 

making poverty a crime: "It must be recognised that fines 

are often imposed without any reference to the accused's 

finances or their ability to pay. Thousands of people are 

being criminalised for petty, victimless offences."



Certainly, there seems to be a litany of cases where 

Scotland's poor are being punished heavily for their 

position at the bottom of the economic heap. Angela, a 

28-year-old Edinburgh woman, was living on benefits in 1997 

and felt unable to pay her television licence. A fine of 

UKP300 was imposed which, naturally enough, she couldn't 

afford to pay either. A seven-day sentence followed. 

Similarly, Anne, 31, a mother of two from Glasgow, was 

caught shoplifting toiletries  for her family in the same 

year. Living on benefits and unable to pay for her own 

sanitary towels, it came as no surprise when she 

subsequently failed to pay the UKP200 penalty levied, and 

her husband was forced to quit his low-paid job to look 

after their children when she spent ten days in Cornton 

Vale. The couple remain unemployed and in debt to this day.



On average, the cost to the prison system of jailing fine 

defaulters amounts to UKP800 for each one. In special 

circumstances it can cost even more: Gerry, a 40-year-old 

haemophiliac from Paisley, failed to pay a UKP150 fine for 

breach of the peace. Due to his medical condition, the 

recovering alcoholic had to be taken to hospital under 

police escort on each of his five days of imprisonment - the 

enormous cost of which was met by the taxpayer.



In response to growing concerns over an increasingly 

inappropriate situation, Scottish Office Prisons Minister 

Henry McLeish last year announced a wide-ranging review of 

the alternative options to imprisonment for such petty 

offenders, the result of which was a consultation document 

on community sentencing published last week. Chief among the 

solutions put forward is the Supervised Attendance Order 

(SAO), a sentencing currently being phased in that affords 

courts the opportunity to impose a compulsory period of up 

to 100 hours in a community education, training or work 

programme for individuals defaulting on a fine of less than 

UKP500. Currently only available as a punishment for those 

who have already failed to pay fines, the document suggests 

SAOs could be expanded to allow courts to dispense such 

orders as a first instance sentence, a move which could take 

account of those unable to pay any kind of fiscal penalty.



Keith Simpson, senior manager at the ex-prisoners' 

association SACRO, broadly welcomes the Scottish Office 

moves to remove from the prison system the large numbers of 

offenders he believes provide no threat to society: 

"Incarcerating fine-defaulters does nothing to protect the 

public and only makes it more likely that they will re-

offend."



That would certainly tally with Janet's experience. Her 

prison record has severely complicated regaining her taxi 

driver's permit and, she fears, scuppered her chances of 

finding other employment: "I panic whenever an application 

form or an interviewer asks me about my criminal record. My 

offence may have been a silly little thing, but I've still 

been there -I'm still an ex-con."



She would also agree that the chances of a petty offender 

getting into serious crime are greatly increased following a 

prison sentence. Despite serving only seven days - during 

which she says she kept a very low profile - Janet claims 

that she could not avoid gaining an eavesdropped education 

in drug dealing, prostitution, fraud and theft.



While Janet and the campaigners who fight causes such as 

hers welcome Henry McLeish's latest initiative, they point 

out that, so far, this is only a consultation document, and 

any results are unlikely to become concrete until the turn 

of the century. Until then, it seems likely that another 

18,000 Scots will have been sent to prison, at a cost of in 

excess of UKP15 million, for a combination of petty offences 

and poverty. It is an experience, says Janet, that will 

leave them like it has her; unemployed, branded, as she sees 

it, a common criminal, and facing a long struggle to get 

their lives back on track.



"It's all been downhill from prison. It's the top of a 

slippery slope that you can't seem to get back up," says 

Janet. "Some days I keep on hoping that things will get 

better. Others I wake up and feel like hanging myself - 

there doesn't seem to be any point to it all."